Those are very different things.

The whole American credit system is frightening. You all but have to own a credit card (here they are only used by people travelling internationally), the credit card needs to be paid off manually (!?!? my bank just auto-withdraws the balance monthly), etc.

Here we employ a straightforward system to vet potential lenders : mortgages almost always have a contractual stipulation that you must use that bank to cash in your paychecks. Your bank will ask for proof of a stable income. You have to put down a downpayment. Defaulting on a mortgage furthermore puts you in a government registry; it’s not “a wink and a handshake” as you put it, but a formal tightly-regulated process.

There is nothing that the credit score system does that the Belgian system doesn’t achieve, except the part where it enables banks to prey on people through a privately owned and unregulated system used to push citizens towards short-term credit and needlessly dangerous financing habits. A 30 year-old with 50k€ in a savings account and no credit history sounds to me like someone who “should” get a mortgage a lot more than someone juggling 3 credit cards and a 10-year car loan. But the american credit system incentivizes the opposite. That is anarcho-capitalist predation.